My old interest is to influece the brain to make it working more efficient.

One of the approaches is to learn complete relaxation, or in other word meditation. The book “Meditation für Skeptiker” by Ulrich Ott suggests a scientific evidence for this claim, and I decided to try.

Selenium is a web browser automation software. In Ubuntu 16.04 it doesn’t work out of the box, and external components should be installed. In this post I note how to install them locally without affecting the system.

Rviz A 3d visualization environment for robots. Sounds intriguing and useful, but the first steps in it are painful. In particular, moving anything is surprisingly a very hard task for a novice who doesn’t know about the right way. Now I have enough experience to describe what to do: Moving things in rviz.

The Linux command line and other software based on readline library support vi editing mode. After I worked on a new system with the default settings for a while, I noticed that I miss this mode very much.

For correct transformation of DITA files (XML-standard for modular documentation), it is necessary to pull information from DTD (document type definition). In my python code, sometimes I did get this information and sometimes not. Now I’ve tracked the source of instability and corrected the code.

For XML to DocBook to .docx conversion, I found that “le-tex transpect” framework has solved many technical issues already, so I overcame the “not invented here syndrome” and decided to rely on this tool. To tune the stylesheets for own needs, I created a github copy of the repository: docxtools. To run the stylesheets outside the framework, a special setup is required. The setup is described in the folder “doc/hello-world“.

In the year 2001 I started to experiment with GUI applications in Python. The experience was summarized and published in the article “A complete Python Tkinter sample application for a long operation“. Now, in the year 2015, a programmer have sent me an updated code. With the minimal changes, which mostly are update of the names of Tkinter modules, the code works.

Sometimes I want to read a web page without its design “improvements”. In many case it is enough to switch off css, and in firefox this functionality is built-in. Shift+F7 to get the developer tools. Thanks stackoverflow for the hint.

GNU FriBidi is an implementation of the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm (bidi). There is a Python binding PyFribidi, but it is not complete. What I need is not a visual presentation of a string, but information where direction is changing. This function is not provided by the binding, therefore I’ve made an alternative using ctypes.